U.S. Pat. No. 6,298,322 describes a system of using a computer readable device as an electronic tag for an item. According to this patent, the computer readable medium can be used as a tag, later removed, and placed into a computer.
Many different kinds of computer readable media are known. For example, USB flash drives have achieved wide acceptance as a computer readable medium that because they allowed read and write access. The price of nonvolatile “flash” memory has made it possible to provide inexpensive storage media of this type.